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May 23, 2007

TAXING

One of the biggest lies heard from the many leftists in America is that wealthy people don’t pay their fair share of taxes. The media constantly reports this lie as if it were gospel. In reality, the wealthiest 10% pay 71% of the taxes. The richest 1% pay 37% and the top 40% of earners pay 99% of the taxes. Sixty percent essentially pay nothing. Sounds like any unfairness comes from the wealthy paying more than their share. State and federal income taxes take about 40% of the earnings of the affluent, and there’s no way around it that I’m aware of.

The falsehood that people with high incomes don’t pay enough tax gets repeated over and over again as if through repetition, it becomes a fact. This lie is rooted in envy and a bankrupt social sympathy where the leftist gets to feel good, not from giving his or her own money to the subsidized, but from seeing that someone else gets squeezed.

It’s particularly galling to see government employees, teachers unions, retirees and welfare recipients lined up to pressure state legislators to take more of the money we work hard to earn. They have soft jobs, fat pensions and some of them do little or nothing to get the tax money that the productive people earn. Do they ever ask themselves what moral right they have to the earnings of others? Nothing creative can ever occur among those who live off the labor of others.